What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.

Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report. 

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

1. Someone does another Drupal vs Joomla comparison
2. Open Source versus the Enterprise Solution
3. Ten Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform
4. Drupal themes go nuclear with Fusion
5. SilverStripe CMS becomes the first Microsoft Certified open source web app
6. Denial of Service on an Apache server
7. Guidelight Business Solutions video of DrupalConSF 2010
8. Sharepoint 2010 vs WCM Platforms
9. We Hear You: Our spam filtering needs to be improved
10. The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interviev

As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.

The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.

Like most website administrators, I have a long history of fighting spammers and protecting my sites from unwanted content. Over the years I've used a lot of tools and services to block spam from reaching the pages of my sites. In recent years, the service I've relied on most heavily is Mollom.  Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website

Overall I've been very happy with the spam filterering Mollom provides for my sites. However, occasionally Mollom can be too aggressive and remove legitimate story and comment submissions. And when I say "remove" I most definately intend to use the word in the literal way. You see, up to now, Mollom had an "all or none" approach to rejecting or accepting spam. When your stories or comments were rejected, the content submission was simply discarded without review by a human.

If you've ever submitted good clean content to CMSReport.com or another site only to only have it identified and discarded as spam, you have every right to be upset with spam filters. Over the past couple months, I've had a number of people upset that the spam filtering CMS Report has been using rejected their story submission. This may not be all the fault of Mollom either as I was also using the Bad Behavior module too. My apologies to everyone that has gone through this experience when they've submitted legitimate comments and stories to this site. Unfortunately, without spam filtering the content on this site would not be good to view. Spam filtering is a necessary part of maintaining a site open to the public.

Luckily, there has been some improvements in the Mollom for Drupal module that should keep your posts and comments from getting discarded while continuing to protect this site from spam. The module has now been improved to to retain spam comments as unpublished posts in a site's moderation queue. So we're giving the new module a try. I won't promise that your content will not be identified as spam, but I do promise you that every intent is being made to review your comments and stories for publication.

After two years of spam protection by Mollom people are beginning to proudly show off their ham/spam stats. Davy Van Den Bremt over at Drupal coder writes:

If you're happy about Mollom, just shout it out on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, ... by putting up a screenshot of your stats and saying how many spam has been caught by Mollom. You can find the stats of your site on your Mollom account. If you're using Drupal, you can find them under Administer > Reports > Mollom Statistics.

If you're using Twitter, use the hashtag #mollomstats. I'm looking forward see how much crap content Mollom has spared us from.

As you can see from the statistics below, CMSReport.com has kept Mollom pretty busy with over 99,500 pieces of spam blocked since we started using the service. One statistic I'd like to see collected is how much content Mollom detects as "Ham" but is later identified by the site administrators as actually "Spam". In other words, I'd be curious to see the statistics for Mollom's "false negatives".

Of course, Mollom isn't the only spam service that provides fun statistics to look at for your site. There was a time I used Akismet to protect my sites from spam. Some of the stats I pulled from Akismet proved to me without a shadow of a doubt that spammers are an evil bunch. Thank goodness for services like Mollom and Akismet helping us protect our sites or this blogging stuff just wouldn't be a fun thing to do.

The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.

Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.

1. Mollom: A solution for comment spam
2. 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS: Drupal wins, Wordpress and Joomla! not far behind
3. Serving a home for my Drupal site
4. WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS
5. Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It
6. Google PageRank
7. Alfresco Module Obtains U.S. DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification
8. Using Wordpress city saves $19,000
9. Cheryl McKinnon, Nuxeo, and Open Source
10. Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia

The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.

Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most part, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.

I was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.

In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.

Lots of news this week regarding the open source SilverStripe CMS.  It is extremely unusual for CMS Report to post something on SilverStripe as well as something on comment spam twice in one week.  Yet, my two favorite companies, Silverstripe Ltd and Mollom, are going to have me do just that because of today's announcement that they've partnered together to help SilverStripe site owners block comment spam on their sites.

SilverStripe and Mollom worked together on improving the code in the official vendor-supported Mollom module which is compatible with SilverStripe 2.3.1 and greater.  Dries Buytaert, a Mollom co-founder, wrote about this new partnership to improve the module's code.

We [Mollom] have been working with Sigurd Magnusson and others at SilverStripe Limited to meet technical and commercial requirements of being a partner, and have been pleased at how easy this has been. SilverStripe's CMS also looks to have a bright future: while young, it now has over 150,000 downloads to date, a great user interface and underlying architecture, and last year won Packtpub's most promising open source CMS award. Therefore, our partnership with SilverStripe certainly meets our goals, and we're happy to have them on board to help the Mollom ecosystem grow.

The folks over at SilverStripe appear pleased with how well Mollom blocks spam. Sigurd Magnusson writes about SilverStripe's own experience with Mollom.

Mollom has proven to be very effective on SilverStripe.com and SilverStripe.org. Together, those two sites have had more than 400,000 spam attempts in the past 6 weeks. Only about one in 10,000 spam appear to be getting through; we'd be overwhelmed with spam otherwise! The effectiveness of Mollom is largely due to Benjamin Schrauwen, a co-founder of Mollom who is responsible for its machine-learning capability. This capability means that as more people use (and abuse!) Mollom, the more it learns good from bad, and its ability to block inappropriate material improves.

Below the fold, you'll also find a video demonstrating how Mollom can be used to protect SilverStripe blogs, forums, and forms against spam.

Hot on the heels of SilverStripe 2.3.0 comes an update that resolves some bugs, adds support for six more languages in the CMS, and launches two great new features.

• Addtional languages supported include: Catalan (Andorra), English (United Kingdom), Spanish (Mexico), Indonesian (Indonesia), Bokmål (Norway), and Serbian (Serbia).
• Mollom is a smart and cheap way to reduce unwanted comments and other website spam. It uses a combination of bayesian filters and CAPTCHAs to protect forms on your website.
• This means you can now install SilverStripe on Microsoft IIS 5.1 and 6.0 (which don't have native URL Rewriters). It also helps those having difficulties with the free URL rewriters on Apache and Lighttpd.

Complete Story

Every year, there are some key information technology people that make mostly sound and trustworthy predictions for the coming year.  I'll be updating this page through the week with links to these visions of what we may expect in 2009.  My own thoughts and vision for 2009 and CMS Report will come later in another post (I am not worthy to place my own comments here).

Content Management and Social Publishing Predictions

Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead) - Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom

Ryan Thrash (MODx) - Evolution and Revolution

Open Source

Dave Rosenberg (Co-founder of MuleSource) - Open source as paid software

Assorted Tech Gurus - The Future of Open Source

Technology and Information Technology

Joe Zuccaro - Twitter, Blogging, Open Source CMS (Drupal), Government

Assorted Analysts - Cloud Computing, Windows 7, Collaboration, Patents

If you come across a posting regarding 2009 by an IT leader, please feel free to leave a link in the comment section below.